22. Everett
I wake reaching for him and find cold sheets.
For one bad second I’m six months in the past, standing in a stripped guest room with my suitcase already packed. Then I hear the kitchen. Cupboard doors opening and closing. The clank of a pan on my hob. A man singing off tune under his breath.
He stayed.
I lie there and let my heart slow down. The whole bed smells of him — woodsmoke worked into the pillows, into the sheets, into me — and the kicking low in my belly starts up as though it’s been waiting for an audience.
I put my hand over it. “That’s your father,” I say, to the general area of my navel.
“I’m afraid the singing may be permanent. ”
By the time I’ve showered and found a shirt that still does up, my kitchen has been colonized. Both pans out. Eggs, toast, butter. He’s at the hob in a clean t-shirt with his hair flat on one side, and there’s a mug of tea already steaming on the counter.
“Morning.” He doesn’t turn around. “Sit. Eat.”
“You cooked.”
“You had nothing in. I went down to the shop on the corner while you were asleep.” He slides eggs onto two plates. He puts one of the plates in front of me.
The eggs are good. He waits until I’m halfway through the plate before he starts.
“How attached are you to this apartment?”
I put my fork down. “Extremely. Why?”
“Six flights,” he says. “No elevator.”
“I know. I’ve lived here for nine years.”
“I was wondering if you were going to look for somewhere new before the baby gets here.”
“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”
“Okay, so walk it forward with me. You, eight months gone, on those stairs. Ice on the front step in January. Then a baby, and a stroller, and the groceries, six flights, twice a day, every day. What happens when the kid’s asleep on your shoulder and it’s raining and the buzzer’s broken?”
“The buzzer isn’t broken.”
“It could.”
“Then I’ll fix it.”
He sets his fork down and looks at me straight on. “You need a different place, Everett. Ground floor, or a building with a lift. I’m not being an ass about it. This is a gorgeous place but it’s not suitable for a kid.”
“You’ve been in this country one day and you’re already rehousing me.”
“I’m not rehousing you. I’m just pointing out the stair issue.”
“This flat is the first thing I ever bought.” I hear my own voice climb and I let it. “You’re being controlling. Is this how it starts? One night in my bed and you’re trying to get me to sell my home?”
Silence. He picks up his coffee and drinks some.
“Sorry, you’re right,” he says.
“That’s it?”
“It’s your flat. Your city, your call.” He shrugs. “I’m still going to worry about the stairs. You can’t make me quit that part.”
My father never backed off a position in his life. He just repeated himself louder. Brody let it go the moment I made it clear that I wasn’t happy.
He clears the plates. When he passes behind my chair his hand lands on the back of my neck, over the gland, warm and brief. My whole body quiets. He’s at the sink again before I can decide whether to lean.
He does the washing-up while I sit with my tea and watch his back move under his shirt. The want starts up again, low and patient. Half the night, and apparently it made no dent.
It’s the scent. It has to be the scent. This flat used to smell of me and not much else. Now every breath has woodsmoke in it and it makes my mouth water.
He catches me at it, of course. Alphas can smell want at ten paces and I’m a lot closer than that. He looks over his shoulder, one eyebrow up, hands still in the sink. “Something you need?”
“Finish the pan,” I say, with as much dignity as I can. “We have a two o’clock.”
“It’s ten in the morning.”
“Finish the pan.”
He doesn’t. Instead he does me, bent over the counter until we’re both panting and satiated.
Then he finishes the pan.
Priya calls while he’s drying his hands. “How is it going?”
“Good,” I say, eyeing Brody at the sink.
“Uh huh. Good okay. Or good amazing.”
I’m not sure I want to discuss this with her with him right there.
“Good,” I repeat.
“Oh my god, he’s still there. I’m going to take that as good amazing then.”
I hope it is. I’m still not sure. Whatever is between us is too fragile to name right now.
“But that’s not why I called. The clinic called to say that they have photographers camped out front. It seems they’ve got a celebrity coming this afternoon and someone leaked her appointment time. They’re suggesting you go in through the side entrance. Apparently, it’s a circus out there.”
“Thanks, we’ll do that.”
“We? I think I better upgrade that amazing to incredible.”
“Maybe,” I say. “Thanks, Priya.”
There’s a pause. “He flew out to you in the middle of the season, Everett,” she says. “Even I know what that means, and I find hockey as pointless as you do.” Then she’s gone, before I have to answer that.
*
I’m not sure that anyone here would recognize Brody Callahan but we take the side entrance anyway. Neither of us are in the mood to walk past the crowd of photographers out front.
In the waiting room he folds himself onto a chair built for smaller men and picks up a pregnancy magazine.
An older woman across the room keeps glancing at him. I watch her try to place him, wondering if he is the reported celebrity and give up. She then turns her attention to me, but looks away with disinterest far too quickly for my ego.
“Mr. Rourke?” The sonographer is brisk and Scottish and completely uninterested in who either of us might be.
We follow her down the hallway and into a small room. I get myself up onto the bed and lift my shirt.
The gel is cold. Brody stands beside me, looking far too nervous for an alpha the size of a small truck. It’s weirdly endearing.
She presses the wand down and the room fills with the sound of my baby’s heartbeat: fast, urgent, absurdly loud, a horse at full gallop through static.
Brody doesn’t move. He stares at the screen — the curled shape in the dark, the flicker at the middle of it — then he reaches down without looking and finds my hand.
“That’s the heart,” the sonographer says, to the enormous silent man, taking pity. “Good and strong. Baby’s measuring right on schedule.”
“Okay,” he says, hoarse.
Then, because he has apparently been saving them up since the airport, the questions arrive.
Is the heart rate supposed to be that fast? Is travel a problem, later, if the baby needed to fly. Does stress reach the baby. And whether stairs — he does not look at me — whether six flights of stairs, daily, would be a concern.
“Exercise is fine,” the sonographer says. “Stairs included.”
I have never liked a medical professional more in my life. Brody grunts, nods, and types something into his phone.
“Do you want to know the sex? We can usually tell at this stage.”
“No,” we say, together, and then look at each other.
It’s the first thing we’ve agreed on.
She prints the pictures. Brody asks for his own copy before she’s finished offering, and I watch him open his wallet and fold the picture into the slot behind his player ID, where the leather has already shaped itself to the card.
Then he puts his hand back on my shoulder and leaves it there while I wipe the gel off.
*
He waits until we’re back in the flat to give me the paper.
“Before I forget,” he says, which is a lie. He’s been checking his inside pocket since the clinic. He puts a folded document on the kitchen counter and slides it across.
“What is it?”
“Read it.”
I read it. Then I read it again, slower, because I don’t believe it the first time.
It’s a relinquishment, drawn up by a firm whose letterhead I recognize, dated yesterday. It’s not yet signed or witnessed. In four paragraphs of clean American legal English, Brody Callahan surrenders every custodial priority his country’s law hands an alpha.
All of it. Unconditional.
“Why didn’t you give this to me yesterday?”
“I didn’t have it yesterday. I called a lawyer last night while you were sleeping and he drew it up for me.” He shrugs. “You snore by the way.”
I ignore the snoring comment.
“This isn’t enforceable here. England doesn’t recognize alpha priority in the first place.”
“I know. It’s not for here.” He nods at the paper. “It’s for the day you decide — if you ever decide — to bring him back to the U.S. I’m not having you weigh that decision against what I could take off you. Now you don’t have to. I just need to get it signed and witnessed properly.”
“You didn’t have to do this.”
“Yeah, I did. You were never going to take this seriously otherwise.”
I laugh. It surprises us both. Then I cross the kitchen and kiss him once with my hand flat on his chest. His heart is going hard under it. “Thank you,” I say, and I mean it.
He takes my face in both hands and kisses me back, slow.
And that’s all it takes. He lifts me onto the counter anyway and steps in between my knees. For a while the only sounds in the flat are the river traffic and us.
He’s unhurried this time, maddening about it, his mouth at my throat until I’m the one issuing instructions, and when I finally haul him closer by the waistband he laughs into my shoulder, warm and pleased with himself. He stops laughing very shortly after that.
We don’t make it out of the kitchen for some time.
*
Two weeks later
The car drops us at the far end of the taxi rank at Heathrow. Brody wrestles the cheap black case out of the trunk himself before the driver can reach it.
“Saturday’s at home,” he says. “Then we fly out west for four. I’ll call you from wherever that is. The time zones are going to be brutal.”
“I know the schedule, Callahan. I own the team.”
“Yeah.” The grin arrives. “Still not used to that being a good thing.”
We stand there. A trolley clatters past. He looks at the doors, then at me, and I watch him decide not to make a speech.
“Watch the games,” he says. “I’ll look up.”
I kiss him. In the middle of departures, on my toes, his hand coming up to cradle the back of my skull. Sooner or later, everyone is going to find out about us. I find I don’t care.
“Go,” I say, against his mouth. “Before I’m ridiculous.”
“Too late.” But he goes — three steps, back for one more kiss, then properly.
The flat is quiet when I let myself back in.
I climb the six flights slower than I would ever admit to him, and on the fourth landing I stop, one hand on the rail, and swear at him quietly, because he’s right about the stairs.
Inside, the whole place smells of woodsmoke. The old me would have had every window open before my coat was off. I hang the coat up and leave the windows shut.
The scan picture is propped against the bag of coffee he’ll be back to finish. I look at it while the kettle boils.
Priya texts in the evening. A property listing — riverside, ground floor, a garden the size of a postage stamp. Underneath it: “He called me from the airport. I am only the messenger.” I send back one word — traitor — and save the listing anyway.
On Saturday, I make tea, turn the lamps on, and put the game on with the room lit like a normal person watching television. First shift, the camera finds him at center ice. The puck drops and he’s moving, and just before the play carries him out of frame, his chin lifts toward the owner’s box.
The Barons win it late. Linus again, top corner, and the building sounds the way it sounded the night I stood in that box pretending not to watch number eight.
I’m out of my seat in my own living room before I notice I’ve stood up, one hand on my belly, informing a person the size of a pineapple that his father’s team has gone ahead.
I pick up my phone.
I saw that.
The reply comes after the final horn, while the studio men are still arguing about the power play.
saw you first.
I look at it far longer than three words deserve. Then I go to bed in sheets I still haven’t washed and sleep better than I have in months.